ARTISTIC INFAMY
In 1929, artist Len Hollobon picked up the phone and dialled the Wellington Police Station to report he was being blackmailed.
By doing so, he unleashed a series of events that resulted in him spending five years in New Plymouth gaol and caused yet-to-be-famous New Zealand writer Norris Davey to change his name to Frank Sargeson.
Located within the instrument collection at Okains Bay Museum is a large drum painted with a striking image of Mitre Peak. Leonard Hollobon painted it in the year before his fateful phone call. A framemaker and artist, he had followed in the footsteps of his better-known father, Jesse, a long time member of the Canterbury Society of Arts.
The family lived and worked at 472 Colombo Street. Len worked for another local picture framer and lived for a time at 98 Hackthorne Road. In 1917, a month short of his 28th birthday, Len was called up to serve in WWI.
He was considered under the standard height at just five foot one, but nothing else stood out to the enlisters to stop him from serving. It seems unfathomable that they missed an old wrist injury that prevented him from holding a rifle!
While the injury eventually excluded him from active service, it didn’t stop his artistic career. Quaint commercial painted souvenirs became his stock in trade. It wasn’t his artistic talent that drew infamy – he was forced to reveal he was blackmailed due to liaisons with two sailors he had picked up at the Wellington Wharves, alongside Norris Davey. The latter at the time worked as a solicitor. He was charged with three counts of indecent assault.
Regulations required prisoners like Hollobon to be segregated. Under the charge of the prison’s ‘mental specialist’, he would have received psychological treatment, including taking part in physical exercise or the arts – singing, recitation, or playing an instrument in the prison band.
After his release in 1934, Hollobon returned various times to Christchurch, at one stage living with his brother Wilfred and his wife. Like Davey, Hollobon was forced to adopt a pseudonym as his father refused to allow him to sign his work with the family name.